The present invention relates to an apparatus for managing confidentiality of information, and a method thereof. In particular, the present invention relates to an apparatus which detects confidential information from information recorded in the apparatus, and a method thereof.
In recent years, management of confidential information such as personal information has become an important challenge, and development of legal systems regarding the management thereof has been in progress. For the purpose of building up a system which manages confidential information by using an information processing apparatus, it is required to specify which information is confidential one from information already recorded in the information processing apparatus, in advance. For this requirement, techniques for detecting a file which includes confidential information have been proposed (refer to: dgiberry “My Privacy” related information, http://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/news/2005/03/09/6780.html; quality “eX PDS” webpage, http://www.quality.co.jp/products/eXPDS/; and KLab “p-pointer” webpage, http://p-pointer.klab.org/). According to these techniques, it becomes possible to appropriately detect confidential information such as personal information from information recorded in a certain information processing apparatus.
A reference, MD5 Homepage (unofficial), http://userpages.umbc.edu/-mabzugl/cs/md5/md5.html, will be described later.
The aforementioned techniques are techniques which detect confidential information from the inside of one environment (for example, a single information processing apparatus, one server apparatus, or the like). Accordingly, in a case where confidential information has been detected in a certain information processing apparatus, even if the same information as the above is recorded in a different information processing apparatus, the same information has to be detected over again in the different information processing apparatus independently. Thus, conventionally, it has not been possible to efficiently detect confidential information from a plurality of information processing apparatuses.
Note that the aforementioned summary of the invention does not list all of characteristics necessary for the present invention, and that a sub-combination of groups of these characteristics can be the invention.